Ben Wheatley may hate film critics, but he couldn't have made High-Rise without them

Yes, film critics are a weird bunch who couldn't direct a film to save their lives. But Ben Wheatley should be thanking them, not attacking them

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Ben Wheatley, the director of High-RiseCredit:
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Tim Robey21 March 2016 • 1:27pm

In the build-up to releasing High-Rise, Ben Wheatley’s glistening, almost maliciously stylish adaptation of JG Ballard, the no-holds-barred director of Sightseers and Kill List has had to contend with the most polarised reviews of his career so far.

I loved High-Rise on its Toronto premiere, but was taken aback – shocked, I’m going to admit – by the hostility it attracted elsewhere. Cleverly riffing on the book’s opening line about a canine barbecue, The Guardian’s Henry Barnes went so far as to call it “a bit of a dog’s dinner”.

Colleagues accosted me with weird looks or sarcastic gibes for giving it four stars. But many smart international critics sprang to its defence – it was as rapid an instance as I’ve ever witnessed of a backlash against a backlash against a backlash, the kind of brutal feeding frenzy of which you rather suspect Ballard would have approved.

Wheatley has since been on the defensive. Pinned down by the online film magazine Flickreel, he was asked for his opinion of critics, and gave an off-the-cuff answer which brought Twitter down on him like a thunderstorm. “It’s a job that I wouldn’t want or seek out,” he responded.

High-rise: bringing ballard to the screen

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This seems honest enough, actually. I’m not convinced I would want the job of a film director either. It’s not my job to want that job, or a director’s to want mine. But on that first point Wheatley also seems, rather more combatively, to differ. “As a creative person I think you should be making stuff,” he continued. “That’s the challenge. Talking about other people’s stuff is weird. Why aren’t you making stuff? And if you aren’t, why should you really have a voice to complain about things until you’ve walked a mile in someone’s shoes?”

This argument is a bit of an old chestnut – you might summarise it as a damning extension of the idea that “those who can’t, critique”. Critics – or at least good ones – bridle against the idea that their work isn’t creative in itself. There’s a world of difference between insta-verdicts being bandied around on Twitter, and the choosing of 800-odd words, the weighing of a film’s ambitions and elements, to offer it up to a readership – as Robbie Collin did with his rave review of Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013), say.

That’s the one Wheatley film I’ve personally struggled to engage with at all, but it’s some indication of criticism’s value that I can look through an eloquent account of a film I found pretty maddening, and wonder anew at how I reacted so differently.

Wheatley shouldn’t necessarily be held to account, in a moment of candour, for finding critics a weird bunch. He’s not wrong. He admits to reading all his reviews, and confessed later to The Observer’s Mark Kermode, “I should probably have kept my mouth shut.”

Ben Wheatley's Kill List

Maybe he was just in a bad mood. But it does seem a case of biting the hand that feeds in a rather palpable way. As the critical brigade have been at pains to point out, many of the reviewers who turned against High-Rise are the same ones who helped make Wheatley’s name in the first place, by encouraging audiences to seek out his early films.

It’s impossible to see how Wheatley’s debut, the Brighton crime-family sitcom Down Terrace (2009), would have gotten him a leg-up without enthusiastic coverage from the press. If anything, that was a film which critics and only critics banged the drum for.

Sightseers - Trailer

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Receipts on its theatrical release were minimal and slow. Wheatley was the unanimous choice for Best Newcomer at that year’s Evening Standard Film Awards, voted for by a handful of broadsheet critics, and would take the Comedy award for Sightseers (2012) three years later. In between these, the whispery occult shocker Kill List (2011) got him the kind of attention that horror fans never ignore.

As he’s gone along, latecomers to Wheatley’s work have been able to explore his career back-to-front, through Netflix, Film4, and other small-screen avenues – I would guess that far more people came to watch Down Terrace after Sightseers was released than before it.

'Rampant stupidty': Gerard Butler in Alex Proyas's Gods of Egypt

None of these films had significant names attached except the imprimatur of a growing cult following. There’s no two ways about it: the trickle-down effect of being rooted for by film critics in Britain and abroad is how a career like Wheatley’s gets nurtured, and expands, to the point where he can command much bigger budgets on High-Rise, and his forthcoming shoot-’em-up, Free Fire.

Wheatley isn’t the only filmmaker to lash out against critics recently. In a spittle-flecked Facebook rant prompted only by the stinky reviews of Gods of Egypt, Australian director Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) declared that “nothing confirms rampant stupidity faster than reading reviews of my own movies”, and clung with evident schadenfreude to the hope that critics were all heading “the way of the dinosaur or the newspaper” anyway.

high-rise trailer

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Let’s be fair – nothing Wheatley said was anything like this intemperate, or so obviously the product of sour grapes. Even so, High-Rise is proving arguably the most divisive film of the year, and the negative reviews are bound to do some box-office damage. Commercially speaking, it needs to attract new eyeballs rather than merely appealing to the Wheatley faithful.

But the truth is that a key constituency of those Wheatley faithful – or his original adopters, if you like – happen to be critics. And it’s dangerous to dismiss the good sense, creativity and career choices of someone who’s just taken against your new film, but went to bat very helpfully for the other four. It’s a strange look, after all, to have critics’ words plastered all over your posters if you really don’t think they count for anything.